Profile

Abbi Torrance

I am interested in the primacy of structure or agency in human behaviour, I look at systems and structures that control us and make drawings to explore this. In capitalist societies the individual is regarded as a self-conscious responsible agent, whose actions can be explained by his or her beliefs and thoughts. This is acquired within the structure of established social practices, which impose on the individual. However, we have learnt from early psychology experiments that we are easily manipulated by authority and even lie to ourselves to fit in with the crowd. Today, we live our lives to a predetermined formula prescribed by powerful global companies. I appropriate choreographed formations to represent human communication and control. A social landscape is built up by combining the formations in diagrams on large scale paper which mimics the way that large corporations see us as data, markets and demographics. These abstract mappings of social networking diagrams and other systems such as feedback systems link the formation drawings to each other, in such we are reduced to a pattern.